


locked out

by thesecretdetectivecollection



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Frank gets shot in the upper thigh/butt area, Gen, M/M, and the whole time we're very very much in Matt's head, and there is like a requisite amount of awkwardness and nudity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28494006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecretdetectivecollection/pseuds/thesecretdetectivecollection
Summary: The last thing Matt was expecting at the end of a long patrol was Frank Castle sitting on his fire escape in the freezing cold, covered in blood.
Relationships: (pre-relationship so nothing really happens? like stuff happens but Stuff doesn't happen, Frank Castle & Matt Murdock, Frank Castle/Matt Murdock, like matt's Noticing Things
Comments: 7
Kudos: 107
Collections: DDE’s 2021 New Year’s Day Exchange





	locked out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SandyEffingFrank](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandyEffingFrank/gifts).



> So I took the locked out prompt and used it pretty loosely here... I also liked the idea of The War, despite being such a quintessentially *Matt Murdock* song, being about Frank, and Matt as maybe the person trying to help him.

He tastes the iron on his tongue before he hears the heartbeat slumped outside his window.

That’s an indication of just how much blood there must be—he can’t smell the steel or the rust of the fire escape, it’s all drowned out by the wet iron filling his nostrils and blooming across his tongue. 

The heartbeat is quiet and slow. On a different night, with air bordering on fresh, Matt would take that slow, quiet heartbeat to indicate relaxation. 

The sheer quantity of blood puts a swift end to that possibility before it can even arise in Matt’s mind. 

To his own horror, he spares a thought for how on earth he’s going to explain this. Does blood stain metal? How long will he have to wash it? What if someone sees him and wants to know what happened? 

The rasp of a voice drags him out of his own mental cleanup. 

“Red.” 

There’s only a handful of people it could be. Two of those people would have to take a pretty substantial detour to land on his doorstep. Another two of them are dead. 

It’s a man, bulky, and that crosses Jess off the list. Besides, he thinks, with a pang of fondness she’d laugh at him for, Jess usually had more sense than to get hurt and ask him for help. 

“Do I look extra pretty tonight?” Frank grits out, because it is, of course, none other than Frank Castle, bleeding all over Matt’s building. “Because you’ve been staring a hell of a long time.” 

“Gorgeous,” Matt says dryly, “Red’s really your color. I’m guessing.” 

“It ain’t,” Frank says shortly. “Now, either open the window so we can get out of the cold, or tell me to get the fuck outta here.”

“Could you get out of here, even if I did ask you?” Matt doesn’t wait for a response, just opens the window. He pulls off the mask, but leaves the suit on. His skin protests, having waited hours for a reprieve from the skin-tight fabric.

“I’d figure it out.” Frank’s heart wavers a little. He’s not sure if he could have made left, had Matt declined to help him. Nor would Frank have asked a second time. He was too proud by far to do anything that even bore a passing resemblance to begging for help. To Frank, Matt’s a last resort.

It makes sense, in a way. The whole city knows that Daredevil and the Punisher haven’t always been on the best of terms. For that matter, neither have Matt Murdock and Frank Castle, though considerably fewer people are aware of that.

Matt doesn’t bother coming up with an answer—he’s all out of witty banter at this hour of the night. The firm’s been doing well, despite Frank’s abysmal trial, and he’s been putting in a lot of hours at his day job, on top of making strategic appearances in the suit at night so low-level guys maybe think twice about holding up a little old lady at gunpoint.

He points to the couch and hears Frank land on it heavily, falling rather than sitting. Matt strides over to the bathroom and grabs the medkit.

Of course, at this point, the stench of blood has been spread pretty much indiscriminately across Frank’s clothes, and it’s hard to figure out where the original wounds even are. He doesn’t let himself consider the fact that maybe his senses aren’t as sharp as they could be, that maybe he’d know where the wounds were if he were more rested, or better fed, or not exhausted down to his hair follicles.

“Where’d you get hit?” he asks.

“Thigh. Fuckers knew I wear a vest, so they just went apeshit. Had to take ‘em out before half of the Kitchen ended up as casualties.”

Matt nods absently. “Gonna need to get a better look at the wound,” he says, wondering if Frank can hear the awkward reluctance in his voice, “you’ve got blood everywhere, I can’t get a good handle on it.”

Frank grunts. He’s probably not looking forward to undressing. Matt feels a pang of sympathy—he’s been there, and it hurts like hell. He thinks back to the times where he’d passed out before and woken to Claire’s gloved hands on his skin and is bizarrely grateful for them, for her.

Frank decides eventually that stripping off in his former attorney’s apartment beats bleeding out or dying of a bullet wound when the chances of infection are increasing every minute. He starts with his vest, pressing together the clasps of the buckle until it releases.

Matt wants to help, but also, offering to take off the man’s pants for him seems to be a little too generous. Even if Frank’s well-muscled and touching his thighs wouldn’t exactly be a chore.

So he settles for helping him up, steadying him and easing the weight on his bad leg. Frank undoes his button and then there’s the sharp sound of a zipper being undone.

Frank hesitates a moment before easing the fabric down. Matt sympathizes—remembering all too well times when he undressed around a wound, wishing he didn’t have to.

“Would it help if I, uh, promised not to look?” Matt wants to take it back, but his mouth doesn’t quite catch up to his brain, and the words come out even though he wishes he couldcringes even as his mouth finishes forming the words.

Frank lets out a grunt that might be interpreted as a distant cousin to laughter. Matt’s heard him laugh before, but it was always disdainful, as if Matt’s willful ignorance of the ways of the world was beyond Frank’s comprehension. He’s never heard Frank Castle’s real, sincere laughter before. Then again, this might be just politeness, though Frank’s hardly the sort to laugh politely. 

Matt wonders what his laughter sounded like in the before times, when his family was still alive. Would it have caught Matt’s ear from down the street if they didn’t already know each other? Would he have noticed it, a sound of warm joy coming from a tall, deep-voiced man, enjoying a day in the city with his family. 

But that Frank is gone and won’t be coming back anytime soon. 

Frank’s pants are around his ankles, mostly thanks to gravity, and Matt maneuvers him back onto the couch, immediately regretting that he didn’t put a towel down first for the blood. 

Frank wasn’t kidding when he’d said high in the thigh... The entry wound is just a few inches below the pelvis. It’s the exit wound that Matt’s more worried about, though. Frank did not mention that the bullet left through his glute. 

He wishes for Claire, for her clinical hands and quiet, sweet voice. But Claire cares about him. That’s the reason she keeps taking all these risks for him, and that’s the reason she ended up in a dark garage with a swollen eye and cracked rib at the hands of Russian mafiosos. Matt isn’t ready to put her into that kind of danger for someone else, and he’s not ready to hear the criticism in her voice when she finds out that he’s harboring a serial murderer.

So he just has to swallow his discomfort and touch Frank’s leg. It’s hot with inflammation and sticky with blood. He wipes it away.

“At least it’s a through and through,” Matt mutters, not expecting a reply.

“Oh yeah, I’m so grateful,” Frank says dryly. It is not fair that he gets to be funny when he’s bleeding out of his ass.

Matt huffs a little. He takes the needle and thread and does the best he can to disinfect the entry wound. There don’t seem to be any blood vessels punctured, so it’s just a cleaning and stitching job.

He’d had a stuffed dog, when he was little. One day, he’d dropped it when he and his dad were walking to the park, and a dog had grabbed it before Matt could. It was just a puppy, is what his dad told him when he was crying over loose cottony stuffing in the middle of the park, just a baby. He didn’t mean anything by it. They’d taken it to his grandmother, who’d stitched it up for him, stitches covering up massive holes. She’d added some more stuffing, but it felt different than the old, stiffer.

And here he is now, a grown man trying to sew a man back together again when he’s lost lots of stuffing. He imagines himself sitting over a stuffed Frank, trying to stitch with simple needle and thread where something much more dangerous had taken its toll.

Frank doesn’t say much, which allows him to stay lost in his thoughts without any need to carry on a conversation. He sits there, heartbeat steady. Only his carefully measured inhales and exhales reveal the pain he’s feeling.

“You’re gonna want painkillers,” Matt says quietly as he finishes the first wound, taping a good chunk of gauze to the area. “Do you have someone who can get you some?”

“Don’t need ‘em.”

Matt bits back his instinctive response, which is to argue, because he is nothing if not a hypocrite.

He can practically hear Foggy’s voice in his head. _Oh, so Frank should take painkillers because he got shot? People who get shot should take painkillers? Huh, that’s interesting._

“Right, let’s get you turned over.” So I can sew up your ass, and then drink so much that I can forget I had to sew up your ass.

He has to help Frank turn over. Okay, so the truth is that he doesn’t quite have to, because Frank could have managed, probably, but he’d end up ripping the stitches before he’d ask for even more help, and Matt wasn’t in the mood to retrace his steps.

So he wraps his armsa round Frank, under his arms, and lays him down onto the sofa. He takes a moment to rue the fact that he didn’t put down a towel first.

The problem is… well, Frank hasn’t taken off his briefs, is the problem.

“I’m gonna have to…”

“Just cut ‘em. Not like I was gonna wear ‘em again after this anyway.”

That’s a good point. Matt grabs a pair of kitchen scissors and snips off the underwear, trying very hard not to consider that all that is standing between Frank Castle’s dick and his couch is a single piece of cloth.

He inhales slowly, clearing his mind the way he does during meditation, and starts stitching up the skin. He tapes a dressing over it.

He considers how to bandage the wound.

“Okay, I need you upright, we’ll wrap it up, and I’ll give you a pair of sweats to wear,” he decides finally.

Frank grunts yet again. Matt could create a dictionary of sound out of Frank’s grunts. The slight huff that indicates amusement, the ambiguous verbal equivalent of a shrug, the sound that serves to acknowledge that he’s heard you and not much else…

Matt helps him up, smelling the way gravity increases the blood flow to the bullet holes, the smell of blood thickening in the air and soaking into the gauze.

He kneels down, and catches the slightest hint of a more concentrated essence of Frank—not blood, but the musk of Frank’s penis, bare and flaccid. 

Don’t think about sucking the Punisher’s dick, he says to himself, and because he has that thought, he is suddenly unable to not think about it.

Heclears his head again and winds the bandage around the tree-trunk mass of muscles that is Frank’s leg. The skin is covered in soft hair, and Matt’s hands brush against old scars now and again, too fast to really map out the topography of Frank’s skin.

Finally, it’s done, and he eases Frank back onto the sofa before retreating to the closet to grab him some loose sweats.

“You can stay here tonight,” Matt says finally, noticing that Frank’s shifting a little, mentally preparing for the pain he’s going to feel as he gets back to his safehouse.

Frank’s body melts into the cushions in relief. When the work wasn’t done yet, he couldn’t let himself completely relax, because if he did, it’d be even harder to get going again. Matt knows the feeling well.

Matt gives him the sweatpants and lingers for a moment.

“Do you need--?” As soon as he says it, he knows that Frank’s going to say no. Frank might accept help if it was forced upon him, if it was offered, but he’d have to hurt a lot more before he’d ask Matt for anything else.

So Matt doesn’t wait for a response, just takes the sweatpants and eases one foot into a leg, and then the other. He tugs them up to the knees, and then he slows down as he pulls them over the thighs, careful not to add any pressure to the bullet holes in Frank’s bad leg.

“Thanks.” The word is rusty, as if it’s been wrenched out of Frank’s throat by force.

Matt waves the word away and perches on the coffee table.

“You can pick locks,” he says finally, letting himself return to one of the first questions he’d had when he’d identified who it was waiting outside his window.

“Not great at it, but I get by.”

“It’s cold out.”

Frank doesn’t respond, though he shifts slightly. Maybe that constitutes a nod?

“You could’ve let yourself in, Frank. You didn’t know what time I’d be back.”

Frank shakes his head at that. “No. It’s—this is your place. You should have a say.”

Matt dropped by Frank’s safehouses once before. He’d just plucked open a window and sat down, waiting in the darkness for Frank to return. One of Fisk’s goons had gotten him, and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to make it back home. He’d figured that Frank wouldn’t mind if he slept there for the night. He didn’t know whether Frank would even be there, had just picked the closest place he could go and hope not to die.

His thoughts must show on his face, or Frank’s recently developed telepathic abilities, because he goes to clarify.

“That’s different. I can pick up and leave any of those places anytime. This is your place. You’re not picking up and leaving anytime soon. You should have a say in who goes in and out of your place, y’know?”

Matt nods. He feels surprised, but he isn’t quite sure why—did he think Frank was completely obtuse about other people’s feelings? Hardly, given that he was so solicitous around Karen. Did he think Frank was simply unable to express his emotions? He thought back to that day in the graveyard, crying as Frank told him about his daughter and his son and his wife.

Maybe he’s surprised at the fact that Frank thinks he counts, that Frank bothers extending those things to him.

“Call out if you need anything, I’m a light sleeper, so I should wake up.”

“Sure, Red. Night.”

“Night,” Matt echoes, unable to wish Frank a good night when he knows he’s just been shot. He goes back to his bedroom and closes the door.

\---  
  


Waking up to an empty apartment shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is. But more than that, it’s a disappointment, too. He’d wanted Frank to call out for him at night, ask him for painkillers, or alcohol, or just to talk. He’d wanted to help Frank up to the bathroom this morning so he could take a shower, or cook him breakfast.

Maybe next time.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy this! It's a smidge late, because I've been in a car for fourteen hours over the past few days and suck at planning ahead, plus I absolutely got super stuck on this fic after the initial image of Frank sitting on Matt's fire escape.


End file.
